CarBux – Car Lease or Loan Calc

CarBux v4.0 released on 09/01/2017!

Adds “Multiple Deals” support and “desired monthly payment range”. Find it on the Google Play store!

CarBux is a simple, but powerful car lease or loan calculator and analysis tool. It uses original algorithms to analyze the short and long term financial impact of a car lease or purchase. Detailed analysis provides close approximation of the actual invoice and high confidence “buy” or “do not buy” recommendation.

The app is the perfect for anyone looking to buy a car who is concerned about the financial bottom line. It is great for anyone that is conscious about the long term financial impact of the monthly car payments.

CarBux can be used to analyze past deals or during the negotiation of a potential car lease or car purchase. Bright colored tiles and colored flags signal potential deal pitfalls.

CarBux – The app that may save you hundreds or even thousands on your next car!

How it works?

There are four distinct deal areas that car dealers can manipulate to maximize their profits:

Acquisition

Initial Costs

Fees and Services

Finance

Dealers are trained to listen and identify the most important negotiation area for the potential buyer. They are also trained to let the buyer have a “partial” win in this area. This tactic desensitizes the buyer senses, so the dealer can take the edge in the negotiation.

For example: for some buyers it is important to get a good discount, for others it is important to get a low monthly payment, and for most of us it is very important to put as less as possible money upfront.

Once the dealer identifies an area of interest critical for the buyer, they just move their profit in another area. The unsuspecting buyer is not informed about it or is desensitized enough and does not pay attention.

For example: if a buyer wants a good discount then the dealer may raise their interest rate on the car loan. If this does not work, the dealer may charge a fee, or drop a possible incentive.

Enter the $oftware!

In addition to the professional training the car dealers have sophisticated computer software. The software makes sure the dealership does not lose money or they may go out of business. The financial software tracks all aspects of the deal. It is the thing that allows the dealer to move the money around with high speed. The fast paced process makes it really hard for the shopper to follow. It is impossible for the car shopper to understand the financial impact of the deal until its too late.

CarBux enables the car shopper to dynamically track the deal and its intricate details at real time and all the time. It is “the tool” to counter the trained salesman and their sophisticated deal tracking software. CarBux gives the shoppers a fighting chance and levels the game field.

How to use the CarBux?

For real time tracking the car shopper should enter the deal numbers as soon as possible. It is the best if the numbers are entered along with the negotiation. Another option is to enter the numbers during the review of the lease or loan proposal.

The more accurate the numbers the better the chances that CarBux will identify the dealer tactics. In many cases CarBux may provide a counter argument. For now our algorithms may be simple and a bit naïve. With your feedback we will improve over time and release more sophisticated software that can find more dealer tricks.

For example: usually negotiations start with the posted on the car window sticker price or MSRP. The dealers will try to sell you the car on this price and will provide lots of arguments why they think it is fair. Then they will “load” the deal with options, fees and services to maximize their profit. Use the CarBux to track if the price includes options, find out if you really are getting a good discount and if you are getting a decent deal.p>

The Flags, the Colors and the Recommendation

CarBux uses four simple forms to collect the information in the same four areas as the dealers: Acquisition, Initial Costs, Fees and Services, and Finance. Once the buyer provides input in any of the of the forms, the CarBux runs the deal analyzers. The analyzers raise flags that indicate potential deal pitfalls and dealer traps using the most recently entered data.

Using the flags severity and correlations the CarBux lights up the corresponding area with color. Colors have a simple meaning:

GREEN is GOOD!

YELLOW not so much.

ORANGE is below the average.

RED sucks!

DARK RED is a mistake.

At first the color scheme may sound complicated. Think of it as a traffic light: cross on green and stop on red. Everything else is just jay walking with at an elevated risk or significant uncertainty.

Go GREEN! All good deals are GREEN!

CarBux Release Updates

CarBux v1.x offers car lease and car loan deal analysis as well as car affordability analysis with simple, but powerful income and expense list management. The fees management list uses similar design as all the lists in the app. It also has the option to quickly empty the list and start from scratch. Colored flags provide quick access to the corresponding input form for quick corrections.

CarBux v2.x released several new powerful features, deal analyzer optimizations and important bug fixes. Action packed bar now provides quick access to a summary of the deal pitfall flags and a quick access to the corresponding editing forms. Visual graphs make and charts make it easy to understand the deal numbers and their impact.

CarBux v5.x is currently scheduled for September. We are adding a great set of features to allow users to compare deals as well as we are buttoning some loose ends. Get the app on Google Play now to get these and many other features in the future. We have a long list in the backlog and we will update the app as frequent as once a month.